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GE Healthcare and Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) today
announced a five-year partnership to enable safer and more precise
cancer immunotherapies. Multiple diagnostic tools will be developed to
help predict both the efficacy of an immunotherapy treatment and its
adverse effects for a specific patient before the therapy is
administered. This would allow physicians to better target
immunotherapies to the right patients and avoid potentially damaging,
ineffective and costly courses of treatments.

Immunotherapies use the immune system to recognize and attack cancer
cells and can be more effective than traditional treatments, but
response rates are often low and side effects can be severe1.
GE Healthcare and VUMC will retrospectively analyze and correlate the
immunotherapy treatment response of thousands of VUMC cancer patients,
with their anonymized demographic, genomic, tumor, cellular, proteomic
and imaging data. They will then develop AI-powered apps that draw on
this data to help physicians identify the most suitable treatment for
each individual patient.

Simultaneously, GE Healthcare and VUMC will develop new
positron-emission tomography (PET) imaging tracers, which together with
the apps, will help physicians to stratify cancer patients for clinical
trials. It currently takes an average of 12 years2 and costs
almost $2bn3 to bring a drug to market. In many cases,
inappropriate patients are recruited to participate in immunotherapy
trials, incurring unnecessary expense and slowing down approvals of new
therapies. It is hoped that the PET tracers will ultimately also be used
to monitor the efficacy of immunotherapies in everyday practice.

“Immunotherapy offers tremendous promise but given the current
unpredictability of some patients’ reactions to treatments, it is also
associated with increased morbidity and cost. This partnership provides
the opportunity to leverage strengths of both of our organizations to
further personalize cancer care by creating new tools that allow
clinicians to more accurately predict how patients will respond to a
specific therapy,” said Jeff Balser, MD, PhD, President and Chief
Executive Officer, Vanderbilt University Medical Center and Dean of the
Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.

“GE Healthcare and Vanderbilt will combine their data science, genomic,
imaging and cellular analysis capabilities to help improve clinical
decision making. This partnership is a great example of the increasing
convergence of the tools, technologies and data used by therapy
innovators and healthcare providers,” said Kieran Murphy, President and
Chief Executive Officer, GE Healthcare.

The first analytics application prototype will be available by the end
of 2019 and the PET tracer proof-of-concept by the end of 2020.

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About Vanderbilt University Medical Center Vanderbilt
University Medical Center (VUMC) is one of the nation’s leading
academic medical centers and is the largest comprehensive health system
in Tennessee. Its core missions are the delivery of patient care,
performing biomedical research and training future leaders in health
care. VUMC is the recipient of top accolades by the National Academies,
the Magnet Recognition Program, the Leapfrog Group, and has been named a
Top Hospital by Truven Health Analytics 14 times. In 2018, U.S. News
& World Report named VUMC to the ‘Honor Roll’ of the nation’s
top 20 hospitals with 10 nationally-ranked adult specialty programs. In
2018, U.S. News also named the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s
Hospital at Vanderbilt among the nation’s ‘Best Children’s Hospitals’
with 10 out of 10 pediatric specialty programs nationally ranked. For
more information and the latest news follow Vanderbilt Health on Facebook,
LinkedIn,
Twitter,
and in the VUMC
Reporter.

About GE Healthcare GE Healthcare is the $19 billion
healthcare business of GE (NYSE: GE). As a leading provider of medical
imaging, monitoring, biomanufacturing, and cell and gene therapy
technologies, GE Healthcare enables precision health in diagnostics,
therapeutics and monitoring through intelligent devices, data analytics,
applications and services. With over 100 years of experience in the
healthcare industry and more than 50,000 employees globally, the company
helps improve outcomes more efficiently for patients, healthcare
providers, researchers and life sciences companies around the world.
Follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and The
Pulse for latest news, or visit our website www.gehealthcare.com for
more information.

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